From the personal experience of living with a wannabe genealogist, I would suggest that if you decide to archive what you have digitally, you will - now or later - want to get a bigger hard drive.

Internal drives are problematic since they generally go away if the computer dies. Internal HDs in "USB Enclosures" have had exceedingly poor durability in my experience. PORTABLE external USB HDs are about as "archival" as you're likely to find if you handle and store them respectfully.

In our (pronounced "her") case, what appeared to be a simple project for a week or two now pretty much fills a 1TB drive, and I'm thinking I may need to go to 2TB soon. Figure about $0.10(US) per GB (~$100/TB). "Moving up" as the stuff accumulates gets to be a pain, since transferring a half TB (500 GB) from an old drive to a bigger new one takes most of a day - or more, and in Windows if you leave the "index for faster searching" turned on it may take a couple of weeks each time before you can "safely remove hardware" to unplug the drive.

John